Author Profile

story, there’s a woman at the forefront,and the locations range from New Yorkto India to Kenya to southern Italy, allplaces she has lived. All the stories, too,explore, in intense and unexpected ways,relationships between men and women:a father and daughter in “The Other Lan-guage”; husband and wife in “An IndianSoiree”; strangers on a plane in “Big Is-land, Small Island.”Marciano says that she “likes to live outof her comfort zone.” She left Rome at 21and came to New York City as a youngwoman in the ’70s and stayed for a de-cade, which explains her perfect English.She lived in Kenya for another decade. “Itook a trip there in 1986,” she says. “I wasliving in Italy and won a ticket to any-where in a competition related to a TVadvertisement I had worked on. It wasJanuary and I wanted to go somewherewarm. The holidays were over; no one wasavailable to come with me so I left by my-self for Zanzibar.” Marciano stayed at theAfrica House, which used to be a Britishclub. “It looked abandoned,” she says, butthere was a lending library left over fromthe colonial days and she stole a copy ofConrad’s Heart of Darkness. “I put my footon this continent and thought, ‘I have tocome back.’ ”Moving to Nairobi, she became amember of “the herd of baboons,” hername for the group of ex-pats she bit-ingly obseves in her first novel, Rules ofthe Wild (1998). The geography, shesays, was inspiring, and she captures thebeauty of Africa as well as the life of theEuropeans, Americans and young jour-nalists who arrived to follow the con-flicts in Rwanda and Somalia, “the wartoursits,” as she calls them. This firstnovel was started in Italian but Marcia-no felt it wasn’t working until a friendsuggested she write in English. “Itmade sense to me then. The characterswere speaking English,” and sheswitched languages. Interestingly, sincethen, she has written all her books inEnglish. She says that writing in Eng-lish frees her—“there are no witnesses ifyou write in another language.” As forEnglish, she adds, “I grabbed the lan-guage. I wanted it.”In her second novel, Casa Rossa (2002),the setting is Puglia, with a woman re-turning to her grandparents’ house tofigure out the past. Marciano visited theprovince, wanting to write about herparents’ generation, to draw a parallelbetween the history of a family and thehistory of Italy. “Italians live in de-nial,” she says. “There’s a lack of clar-ity about the country’s role inWWII. Despite our partisans, theAllies saved us.”The next novel, The End of Manners(2008), takes place in Afghanistan,where she went in 2004 to get mate-rial for a film script for an English-man who was doing a film about thecountry from the end of the 19thcentury, about the influence of theBritish, the Soviets and the Ameri-cans. “I felt I needed to see Afghani-stan to work on the script but I neverfelt safe there. I never saw a woman,and the Westerners were aggressive;social forms had no meaning.” Mar-ciano grew up with women; her fa-ther died when she was 11. Hermother, Paola Angioletti, produced aradio show called Midnight Tale inwhich an actor read a story she se-lected. The show’s following relatedto the midnight hour when theshow aired: “They were bakers,truck drivers, people who wereworking at night.” Marciano says, ac-knowledging that she did not have a tra-ditional life, but one which she appreci-ated later.

She’s excited about The Other Language,
and is coming to the U.S. in April to promote it. She’s pleased to have her editor,
Robin Desser, be so passionate about her
work; and also for the support for short
stories in the U.S. And up next? Marciano mentions India, where she goes every
year to a writer’s colony near Bangalore.
“There’s always something to learn in
India,” she says. “Act I was New York;
Act II, Africa; Act III?” There’s a good
chance that India could be Act III. ■